Wartime secrets left behind

In the 1990s, a war in Sierra Leone killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the country. Yet writer Aminatta Forna, who is from Sierra Leone, has dedicated her absorbing new novel, The Hired Man, to that other 1990s war-torn region, Yugoslavia, thus subtly illuminating the prolonged aftereffects of all wars.Duro is a Croat living in the ghostly town of Gost. One day, an Englishwoman...

Two physicians in Africa examine the scars left behind by war

Writer Aminatta Forna spent her childhood in the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone, the daughter of an African father and Scottish mother. Her father Mohamed trained as a physician in Scotland, but filled with hope created by post-colonial possibilities, he returned to Africa with his new family, working at first in a clinic, then holding political office as minister of finance. In 1974, he was...